The Project so Far

I realized this week that this little experiment of mine has gone on for a month, so I figured I’d stop and look at how it’s gone.

At the beginning of October I began this self-imposed project of writing one entry per weekday, every day. As much as I hope you’ve all enjoyed the content, the real purpose was for my sake. I tend to write in fits and starts, so I was looking to get more consistent practice, both with writing and with maintaining some level of discipline.

So far it’s worked out pretty well, and I’ve learned a few lessons that would hopefully be of use to anyone.

I moved off of Livejournal for this one big reason - I needed to be able to write drafts ahead of time and schedule their posting, something Livejournal’s not so good at. As a secondary issue, Livejournal’s blocked at work - this is not a big deal for posting (I try to do it all the night before) but I have enough vanity that I like checking comments over the course of the day.

Blogger’s been good - it offers the features I need with a minimal amount of fiddliness. I have a self-hosted wordpress blog, and as much as I like it, it is easy to get distracted by messing around with plugins and keeping up with the latest version. That said, I do miss the flexibility and power that wordpress offers, so if I were to do it again I would probably go with a wordpress hosted blog, but the benefits are not so much greater that I would deal with the hassle of swapping over. If blogger’s spam filter proves useless, or if some other problems reveal themselves, I might reconsider, but I’m good for now.

On the writing end, its amazing how satisfying it is to get ahead of things. This week’s material on villainy was done as one block (pulled in from a One Bad Egg Project that never saw the light of day) so I got to relax over the course of the week, and that was a good feeling, but it also made me a little lax. It’s satisfying to get ahead of the game, but if I get too far ahead, it’s easy to get lax.

But the big lesson has been that I need to write less. Not less often, but rather, shorter material. I have a tendency to just keep writing until I hit a stop point, and the net result can be a little bit sprawling. That’s problematic for two big reasons. First, it makes it much harder to maintain any kind of schedule - without a clear sense of end points, it’s hard to get to “done”. The second is that shorter is better for blog posting - the occasional long post has its place, but people have a lot of material to absorb in the day, so something that’s quick to read and gets to the point has a lot to offer.

This is actually a kind of fun lesson.. The path to getting better at this will also make it easier to do, so I’m pretty good with how that shakes out.

I’m happy with how it’s gone so far, and I hope to keep it up. And I hope you all will continue to enjoy reading it, and I thank you for your attention to this little project so far.